
A native of county Carlow, I now live by the sea in the harbour town of Dungarvan Co. Waterford. My two children are grown and flown into their own creative lives, so my time and energies are my own, and I am able to devote my creative self whole-heartedly to my interests and passions.
Like most artists, mine is a restless enquiring mind, aided by restless and enquiring hands – useful for digging my way into trouble in the dark recesses and back out again, with some artifact fashioned in the forge of the journey.
The form of the artifact varies between paintings mostly, and stories sometimes. I exhibit and I publish, and am lucky enough to be represented by the Molesworth gallery in Dublin, who support the work no matter what. I teach because I love it – it is an act of love.
I design workshops to involve myself and others with creative ways of researching and learning, because creative ways are involving and illuminating ways, that are deep and lasting and true. What these activities have in common, is the juicy challenge of communicating mind- bending ineffable stuff.
For me, nothing is more mind-bending than the mind itself? – consciousness, and its energetic companion; the creative force. It is not possible to step outside of consciousness to examine it, because it is the very instrument of examination.
The only way to look into it, is to go into it, and what is to be realised there, cannot be objectified, because it is subjectivity itself. Tricky stuff.
It does however unleash a force that leaves an observable trace, in all that we make of ourselves and the world. Creativity evidences a spectrum of consciousness to which we belong.
The size and shape of it is incalculable, it may even be infinite, and so, eternally unfathomable. We live as a mystery within a mystery, and that is exciting stuff.
The creative force flows through consciousness in a proliferation of every possible form. A human being is a perfect conduit for it and all we have made, all we have shaped since the dawn of our time, including ourselves, is because of it. That’s powerful stuff.
But it is elusive stuff too, because it has not been at all clear, how this force manifests and operates, until now, until the O(map). The O(map) clarifies this stuff.
The O(map) is more like a discovery than something I have worked out. As such, it belongs to us all, and it is my personal mission and ambition to share it with everyone and anyone who is interested in this remarkable stuff.
I am open to doing that in any and every way I can, in every sphere of human endeavour, because there is not one thing that we do, not one thing we make, not one way to be as human beings, without it.
All Rights Reserved 20226 © Catherine Barron